Menswear has a short list of summer staples, here Jacqueline Wake Young looks at one of them, the T-shirt.
The T-shirt has had some great moments.
It made its first appearance in print in F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel This Side of Paradise in 1920 and was inducted into the Oxford English Dictionary that year, along with Jazz Age and plus-fours.
Fitzgerald didn’t invent the word but included it in his character’s packing list for boarding school, writing: “So early in September, Amory, provided with ‘six suits summer underwear, six suits winter underwear, one sweater or T shirt, one jersey, one overcoat, winter, etc’ set out for New England, the land of schools.”
The T-shirt’s next big moment came in 1951 when Marlon Brando wore one as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, followed in 1955 by James Dean in jeans and T-shirt in Rebel Without a Cause.
Until this point the T-shirt was considered an undergarment – it was after all an evolution of long-johns – so wearing it like this symbolised scandal and rebellion.
A few decades earlier such an outfit would have landed a person in jail in Cuba, where the wearing of underwear-like tops in public was banned.
This was a pain for labourers, after all the T-shirt came about to make such work more tolerable.
Towards the end of the 19th Century workers had started to cut their jumpsuits in half during the hotter months, revealing the top half of their undergarments, and it was during the Mexican-American War in 1898 that an early version of the T-shirt was first manufactured.
It had what may have been its first big moment in 1904, courtesy of the Cooper Underwear Company.
An advert showed one man looking embarrassed while holding his buttoned undershirt together with safety pins and another man smoking a cigar while sporting a ‘bachelor undershirt’ with the slogan – “No safety pins, no buttons, no needle, no thread”.
The next year the US Navy caught on and said sailors should avoid undershirts with buttons, issuing the T-shirt as standard by 1913.
These days the T-shirt will feature high up on any modern man’s packing list for summer, along with shorts, cargos, chinos, and short-sleeve shirts.
It is, however, unlikely that six suits of summer underwear and six suits of winter underwear would still make the cut. No offence, Mr Fitzgerald.
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